The "Direct Session" dimension, not to be confused with the default channel grouping or source dimension, is something different. It can tell you if a session was genuinely from its reported campaign (reported as No), or if it was simply bucketed there due to the last non-direct click attribution model (reported as Yes). I didn't mention this dimension in the article because it has some flaws which can cause brain bending complexities, plus it goes a little beyond the scope of this article, which I tried to gear more towards marketers and non-expert GA users. It's certainly an interesting one, though.
I have 103 with the trackbacks in the bottom, lol. For now... and I hope to get many more. I think the sources can be useful and hope someone will find good use of them :) I love how people are in the mood to comment. My favorite thing about blogging are all the connections and I try to be really helpful. So I guess that is the reason I get a lot of comments. Not to mention that I even put a post up on my blog asking everyone to help me be one of the winners :) This is my first contest. I am glad you liked it and sorry for popping up everywhere, lol.

Would you mind sharing your stumbleupon user name with me? I would love to follow you and your shares! :) I am beginning to get more active on SU and it is definitely paying off. I have had a few posts in the last several weeks that have brought in 600-700 visits each. :) In regards to your "challenge" I am going to try out paper.li I will let you know how it goes.

This topic seems actually quite controversial. Google answered the question by what could be taken as a denial. But their answer was kind of open to interpretations. And on the other hand, there are studies (one of them from Moz) that showed linking out has an impact. So, how can you be so assertive? Is it something that comes out from your own experiments?
The strength of your link profile isn’t solely determined by how many sites link back to you – it can also be affected by your internal linking structure. When creating and publishing content, be sure to keep an eye out for opportunities for internal links. This not only helps with SEO, but also results in a better, more useful experience for the user – the cornerstone of increasing traffic to your website.
So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.
Hi Brankica, Thanks for a great article, you are so generous with sharing your knowledge and I always look out for your posts etc. I recently bought a product for my personal use that really blew me away, so I wrote about it on my blog, and sent the supplier a link. They were absolutely delighted when they saw my blog post they added it to their testimonial page with a link back to me. Indirectly the product links to a topic covered on my website so this was a great way for me to get a little extra exposure. I'm def going to work through your list and do at least something new from it every day. Cheers, Caroline
Using the same 2 steps, we can also filter the All Pages section and the Content Drilldown to explore further how our organic traffic is using the site. A focus on this Organic Traffic is important because this traffic is, in many cases, free traffic that your website is receiving. Focus on doubling down on your pages that perform well and working to identify any pages that aren’t getting the organic traffic they deserve.

Improving organic traffic can sometimes be challenging, but if you apply the correct SEO strategies, the hard work will eventually pay off. Search engine traffic is great because it’s relevant and targeted. For most websites, organic traffic converts much better than traffic from social media or other sources. Another great advantage is that visits from search engines are much more consistent.

Like I said at the beginning, building organic traffic is hard. Anything that promises a shortcut to an avalanche of traffic will more than likely lead to a penalty down the road. Embrace the daily grind of creating great content that helps users and provides a solution to what they’re looking for. In the end that will drive more organic traffic than any shortcut ever will.
Hey, Matt! Thank you for your sharing, and I learned much from it, but I still have a question. We began to do SEO work for our site 2 years ago, and our organic traffic grew 5 times ( from 8K to 40K every day). But two years later, it is very difficult to get it grow more, even it drop to 3.2K every day. So can you give me any advice to make our site's traffic grow again? Thank you in advance!

OMG and for the love of God, this is truly one amazing post! Not because of the content, because I have already commented on that somewhere in this mass of 200+ comments. the content is great...the fact that I continue to get emails from each and every comment ever made on this post since I commented is telling me that I need to remember to shut off the subscriptions eventually. You did one hell of a job on this post though...this really is a kick-ass list.

This is my first time on your blog and I found it when I was reading up on who won the contest at Famous Bloggers. I can definitely see why now! I spent a good amount of time reading and going through all the advice that you've stated in this post since I am fairly new to blogging. I believe one of the biggest hurdles that I will come across when trying to further my blogging experience is driving traffic to my blog. I will make sure to apply many of the techniques you've listed in this post to my blog and hopefully I'll see some traffic! I will definitely continue to read your informative posts. Thanks! :)

I once subscribed to a thread on Site Sketch 101 and it was a game where there were supposed to be hundreds of comments. You can imagine how many e-mails I got in an hour! Nick (the blog author) was laughing at me, cause, like he said, that really was a major fail. I would just call it a dumb thing what I did over there, lol! But who would know there will be so many comments here anyway. I was hoping for some but did not expect this many. Well, now I do hope I will get even more :)
For our client: We rolled out a successful implementation of rel="author" for the three in-house content writers the company had. The client had over 300+ articles made by these content writers over the years and it was possible to implement rel="author" for all the aged articles. I advise anyone who has a large section of content to do so as it will only benefit the website. We were also in the process of rolling out further schema markup to the site's course content as it only has a benefit for CTR.

The Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines insert advertising on their search results pages. The ads are designed to look similar to the search results, though different enough for readers to distinguish between ads and actual results. This is done with various differences in background, text, link colors, and/or placement on the page. However, the appearance of ads on all major search engines is so similar to genuine search results that a majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between the two.[1]

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.
Hey Christy, thanks so much for the comment and I hear about this HARO thing for the first time. I am definitely going to have to check it out. I have this OCD (lol) that as soon as I hear about something new, I gotta join and try it out. This is officially the new item on my to do list that now has only 563 bullet points. Just kiddin', although we all have long to do lists I always find extra time to see what are the things other bloggers talk about. Thanks so much again :)

Simply great and agree with your all subject...! I like the way you explained. Each heading are awesome Create the best quality content and consistently, Long tail keyword is better, Guest blog for SEO is dead, and Aha....Do not anger Google. conclusion is awesome. Hard work and Patient is best practice to see the good results in any field. Really useful and helpful post indeed. Thank you.

Hey Bryan, thanks for the awesome comment. When it comes to videos and photos I kinda have the same feeling like you do, but when ever I do and see some great traffic coming from it, I kinda kick my self in the ...you know... I think article marketing will go on and on, I never had problems with it cause I always approached those articles as I do my own blog posts. So I think, as you say after the adjustment, there will be more of article traffic generation. Thank you so much for the nice words!

Hey Patricia, glad you liked the post and found more things to do... Like you are not overwhelmed with stuff lately anyway, lol. Please, don't try all at once. One traffic source every few days. For two reasons: not to get overwhelmed and to be able to track some results. I think if a blogger would master only 3 to 5 of these sources, it would bring incredible amounts of traffic. By master I mean just that - be a master, not just do it in some spare time ;)

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:
This quickly turns into a “chicken-and-egg” situation. Are fewer people coming to your site due to poor visibility in the SERPs? Or have you shifted your product focus, and is that why consumers are no longer interested in your brand? For a quick check, look at Google Search Console data, and pull positions and clicks by page. If position is staying relatively stagnant, this means your brand is not losing visibility in the SERPs, and there may be a bigger issue at play.
People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.
So much traffic sources here, that I have not even come across. While there are the "most popular" ones, half of the sites you mentioned here are relatively new to me, so they all will be worth checking out. You are right about "forums" though, and although I am basically stuck with two (warrior and another that is unrelated), it does provide you some traffic provided as always, that you provide good feedback, help people, engage effectively with the community and of course, having a good and well structured signature :) Finally published :) Hopefully on your way to 300+ RTs, LOL

A link in the comment itself may or may not be called for. I recommend only including a link of you have a post on your site that ties in nicely. If you do, you can use it to expand your comment. “By the way, I wrote a post on this topic as well over here. My conclusions were X and they seem to contradict yours; what are your thoughts?” If you aren’t able to work in a relevant post, limit your link to in your profile for the comment, where the website field sits.

Make a campaign on microworkers about "Post my Link On Relevant Forums". Currently Micoworkers has about 850.000 freelance workers worldwide. You know that posting a link on Forums is not that easy. There would be thousands workers out of your campaign after they're trying hard the get a forum that accepts a link within their post. But the benefit for you is that they have visited your link to understand your site to search a relevant forum for your link. On this campaign you only accept real clickable link on forums. From about 850.000 there will be ten to hundred thousands freelancers who are interested to work on your campaign "if " you make a long lasting campaign(s) by hiring at least 200 posisions and teasing among 850.000 workers by paying $0.30 - $0.50 once one successfully posted your link on a relevant forum.
Great article! SEM Rush's new ranking study of 600,000 search queries showed a positive correlation between direct traffic and top rankings. They indicated that Google prioritizes domains with authority and consequently more direct traffic when ranking websites in its search results. See their study here: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/. So, direct traffic can be viewed as a positive ranking correlation.
Referral traffic is the third most important source, bringing 8.3% of total traffic to the leading retailers’ websites. There are four online retailers that receive significantly more referral traffic than others: Amazon, Apple, Walmart, and Gap. Live.com is their leading referral source sending nearly 3% of traffic to these sites. Also, we see that Amazon often directs its visitors to Walmart , which brings this company 3% of its traffic. And Amazon itself receives most of its traffic from Amazon-affiliated sources such as Primevideo.com and Audible.com.
Buy brasilian search traffic visitors from Google.com.br for 30 days – We will send real brasilian visitors to your site using Google.com.br's search field with your keywords to improve your SERP CTR and SEO strategy. All visitors will be shown as organic traffic in your Google Analytics. Having a constant in organic web traffic is imperative in order to maintain your rankings and minimize the risk of dropping in the SERP's. So, don't wait use our Google Brasil Web Traffic Service today …
Thank you Jayne, for doing all that voting and sharing, means the world to me! I am glad you saw some new ideas and looking at all the comments, I think I killed a really bug tree with this post, that is how many people want to print it out, lol. If at any point of time you get stuck with one of these, send me an e-mail, tweet, what ever and I will try to help you with extra ideas :)
For our client: We only used a smaller quantity of very high-quality link building each month. So, for example we only built 40 of the best links each month to supplement the work we were doing on the content marketing front. We also invested heavily into tracking competitor backlink profiles, using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. We worked out how the competitor's acquired specific backlinks, then by using outreach and content creation we obtained these links.
Putting it simple, duplicate content is content that appears on the world wide web in more than one place. Is this such a big problem for the readers? Maybe not. But it is a very big problem for you if you are having duplicate content (internally or externally) as the search engines don’t know which version of the content is the original one and which one they should be ranking.
Hey Julia, thanks so much for the comment. I just saw the idea you were talking about, that is awesome. I think you are right cause although it seems a bit inconvenient, I personally wrote down a few URL like that in my cell phone or notebook to check it out when I am back at the computer. Wow, this is something I need to think about. Also, how about those big billboards?
Hey Brankica! Awesome contest entry! Love it. I, like you, get a decent amount of traffic from Ezine Articles, too! I am not in a rush to do anything drastic just because of the algorithm change. Hubpages is also a lot of fun and I am pretty close to finally making my $100 payout from Adwords. My hubs have been viewed over 10,000 times and I've had a lot of fun there.
The term “organic traffic” is used for referring to the visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which defines the visits generated by paid ads. Visitors who are considered organic find your website after using a search engine like Google or Bing, so they are not “referred” by any other website.